Did watching the Celtics game at Milwaukee Monday night seem different to you? Jackie MacMullan hopes it didn't.

That night, MacMullan became the first female game analyst on a local Boston telecast involving any of the region's four major sports teams — the Celtics, Bruins, Red Sox or Patriots.

While MacMullan admitted that it was "really cool" to be the first woman, she was pleased that her basketball knowledge, not her gender, was the reason CSNNE asked her to work the game. MacMullan played basketball for Westwood High and the University of New Hampshire and has covered the Celtics and the NBA for The Boston Globe, Sports Illustrated, ESPN and ESPNBoston.com.

She has a knack of getting athletes to open up to her and has written books with Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Shaquille O'Neal. In 2010, she became the only woman to receive the Curt Gowdy Media Award in the 24 years the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame has handed out the honor.

"I would like to think at this point in my career," she said, "people aren't asking me to do stuff because I'm a woman. That would bum me out."

MacMullan, 53, has a found a way to fit in the male-dominated NBA since she began covering the Celtics in the late 1980s for the Globe. (No, she wasn't the first woman to cover the Celtics on a regular basis. The late, great Mary Shane of the Worcester Telegram earned that honor in the early 1980s, as MacMullan pointed out.)

One day early in her career with the Globe, MacMullan was interviewing one of several coaches who had congregated. Someone told a crude joke with foul language, then noticed MacMullan was within earshot and apologized.

Matt Guokas, coach of the Orlando Magic at the time, told the embarrassed jokester, "No, no, don't worry about her. She's one of the guys."

Because her name is Jackie, many of her readers didn't know she was a woman until she began appearing on television, most recently on such ESPN shows as "Around the Horn," "The Sports Reporters," and "PTI." But she's a loving wife and mother of two who considers ESPN's Doris Burke to be the true pioneer for female analysts in the NBA.

MacMullan traded phone messages with Burke, her good friend, before working Monday's game, but they didn't get to speak to one another.

"She's the one that's the trailblazer in this," MacMullan said, "and I'm glad she is because she's a really talented person. I think she's really good at this, and for me, it's just sort of something I'm trying out."

MacMullan filled in for Cedric Maxwell alongside Sean Grande on Celtics radio a few years ago, but she never had worked a game on television until CSNNE asked her if she could go to Milwaukee. Tom Heinsohn, 79, no longer works most road games, so others fill in for him alongside Mike Gorman.

"I thought, 'Why not?'?" she said. "As this point of my life, it seemed like another challenge."

MacMullan joined Gorman and Heinsohn for a quarter of Sunday's home loss to Dallas before working Monday's game with Gorman.

"There hasn't been anything for a while," MacMullan said, "that's gotten me that jazzed up, to be honest with you, because I wanted to do a good job. I'm sure I'm not everybody's cup of tea, and that's OK."

MacMullan doesn't tweet, so her 17-year-old son read her the negative Twitter comments about her performance.

"But I'm not doing it to impress anybody," she said. "I just did it because it was another challenge for me, and I really enjoyed it, and I'm grateful to Mike Gorman for making it easy for me."

Heinsohn advised her to develop a rhythm with her commentary, which is not the same as developing a chemistry with Gorman.

"I didn't really understand," she said, "what he meant until I started doing it, and then I understood exactly what he meant because I don't really think I had the rhythm in the beginning of the game, but I feel like as the game went on, I had a better sense of how to be in concert, when to talk, when not to talk."

"I thought she did a terrific job," Gorman said. "I thought she was great in the second half. The first half, I think she was, as is the case when people do it for the first time, they tend to say everything in their head once before they say it out loud so it doesn't allow for a lot of rhythm. She lost that at halftime. I thought in the second half, she was like somebody who had done it 20 or 30 times before. She could be very good if she wanted to do it."

Gorman said MacMullan is scheduled to work another Celtics game on March 11 at Indiana. Who knows? She might even interview Bird during the telecast.

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